Women’s Movement and the Development of Civil Society in Taiwan
Fifth Annual Conference of European Association of Taiwan Studies
Fang-Mei Lin
Graduate Institute of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature
National Taiwan Normal University
I. Introduction
This paper attempts to explore the changing relationship between the state and civil
society in Taiwan by using women’s movement as a case study. My major empirical
interest is in analyzing the apparent shift of feminist advocacy organizations from
social movement into NGOs forming partnerships with the state to deliver service.
The empirical phenomenon will be situated in a theoretical framework of the state.
I will begin with a discussion of the changing nature of the state. In conventional
perception the state was regarded as a centralized, unified entity with constitutional
sovereignty of parliament and the core executive. In recent decades, the state has been
described as networks of policy comprised of various actors across different sectors.
The increasing participation from civil society actors in public policy has been lauded
as enhancement of democracy. On the other hand, the diminution of direct state
influence is described as ‘hollowing out’ of the state; and the state as networks of
multifarious actors is also described as ‘fragmentation of the state.’ In this paper, I
echo the concept of the state as networks or intersection among various sectors.
However, I will argue that as policy networks proliferate, the state has the ability to
set up the rules and environment under which these networks operate. Parallel to the
so-called fragmentation of the state, various strands of civil society have segmented
and professionalized, each of them being sutured into a particular set of networks.
Readers of this paper may find out that women have disappeared in this paper,
and even civil society barely exists. That is exactly the empirical and theoretical point
I want to raise. When gender mainstreaming policy was introduced in recent years,
administrative and procedural issues such as accountability format, performance
indicators, budget analysis, statistics predominate policy-making regarding women’s
rights. In the meantime, coalition among different social movement such as gender,
environment, labor, human rights, which was active in the 1980s and 1990s, barely
existed since 2000. This is a paradox that as partnership between civil society and
government was advocated and put into practice, proliferation and expansion of
1
policy networks absorb social forces, with the result that civil society as a whole
seemed to disappear. In section II below I will start with theoretical introduction of
the changing nature of the state and its relationship with civil society. Section III will
present an outline of the relationship between the state and women’s organizations in
different historical phases. Section IV will discuss gender mainstreaming policy that
is the current framework of gender policy in Taiwan.
II. Governance, Governmentality and Civil Society
Before we formally present a definition of civil society, we have to keep in mind the
fact that civil society is often defined in a negative way by what it is NOT and plays a
supplementary role to the point of reference and departure. Civil society is also called
non-governmental organizations or non-profit organizations, and the rationale for its
existence is due to the failure of the state or the failure of market. In recent years some
scholars became skeptical about such negative approaches and attempted to look for
the social origin of civil society (Anheirer and Themundo, 2002).
If defining civil society by its distinction from the government and the business
sectors does not do justice to the intrinsic importance of civil society, then in
contemporary social and political theories, the state can no longer exist on its own,
either. The state has lost monopoly on power to control and regulate. The state has
been conceptualized as self-organized networks of policy (governance), or as being
sidelined by ensemble of institutions, discourses, calculations and tactics that allow
exercise of diffused power (governmentality). The state and civil society thus define
and become complement to each other.
1. Civil Society
According to Center for Civil Society, London School of Economics and Political
Science, civil society can be defined as:
Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced action around shared
interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are
distinct from those of the state, family and market. Civil societies are
often populated by organizations such as registered charity, development
non-governmental organizations, community groups, women’s organizations,
faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help
groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy
2
groups.1
We can further explore this passage by referring to the book Civil Society by
Michael Edwards (2004). Edwards approaches civil society through triple layers: first
as associational life; second as good society; finally as the public sphere. Civil society
means voluntary associations of people for common interests and goals. However,
there are a diversity of associations which may espouse contradictory assertions on
the very same issue, for example, pro-life and pro-choice regarding women’s
reproductive rights and abortion. Edwards goes on to raise the principle of good
society. Civil society exists to promote good society, on equal terms with the state and
market. But what is good society? How do various parts of society collaborate and
know which direction to go? Here we need the public sphere, a space for the
emergence and expression of diversity of opinions to engage with each other, debate,
disagree, and in the process citizens learn to concede to reach consensus.
In pre-modern period, production, consumption, and human activities take place
mostly in the family and the community. The roles of both the state and market are
limited. With the growth of industrial capitalist society, the state and market expand,
and many of the traditional functions of the family have been replaced by the state or
market. Theories of civil society have gained ascendancy in recent decades due to
several factors. First, ordinary citizens and academic researchers alike see the
importance of enhancing the role of civil society to counter-balance overexpansion of
the state and market. Second, changes at the macro-level has led the very nature of the
state to shift from being a top-down vertical authority into a horizontal networks of
policy making and resource allocation (Marinetto, 2007).
Women’s movement and other social movements such as labor, environment, and
consumer rights had played an important role in steering the direction of civil society
towards an integration of associational life, ideals of good society, and practices of the
public sphere by debates, discussion and advocacy. Civil society includes religious
organizations, charity and philanthropy, self-help groups, which mostly operate
without explicit goals of influencing public policy; the social movement aspects of
civil society, on the contrary, contain a strong sense of mission for social reform and
policy advocacy. Civil society as manifested and instantiated by social movements is
independent from the state (in the sense of not in direct control or intervention by the
state), and at the same time strongly wishes to participate in the process of policy
1
Center for Civil Society, LSE, retrieved February 13, 2008, from
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CCS/what_is_civil_society.htm
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making and implementation. In this paper I will argue that in addition to emphasizing
the ascendancy of civil society, we have to look at the changing nature and function of
the state. The state has changed from being a unified, centralized top-down authority
into nodal points of policy networks with various actors that are outside or beyond the
central executive. Women’s movement initially challenged the state from a marginal
position; since 1990s, mechanisms for coordinating women’s affairs across the public
sector and the voluntary sector (women’s organizations) were set up. As these
mechanisms grew larger in terms of budget, number of organizations involved, tasks
to be done, the state as interface and ensemble of networks has absorbed and
appropriated more and more forces from the civil society.
2. Changing Nature of the State: Governance and Governmentality
As mentioned above, the state had been regarded as a unified and centralized
top-down authority, with constitutional sovereignty of parliament and the central
executive. In recent decades, the state has faced challenges to its monopoly of power
from two sides: on the one hand, the increasing salience of global economy, on the
other hand, crisis in election democracy which led to increasing demand from
grass-roots organizations and civil society for more participation. In this process,
theorists of the state began to use the term ‘governance’ to describe the new ways of
governmental functions.
Governance is often confused with government; these two are highly related, but
governance as a process-oriented aspect can be applied also to business corporation,
to NPOs, to community, or even to a project. There had been a traditional distinction
between politics and governance: the former is about solving divergent opinions to
reach common goals, and the latter is the administrative, process-oriented. However,
contemporary theories began to questions this distinction and point out that both
involve the exercise of power.
There are three approaches to the exercise of power: 1. top-down, hierarchical
methods; market mechanism, constituted by supply and demand, using the principle
of competition; 3. public-private partnership (PPP), focusing on collaboration of
government, business, and civil society. It is to the third approach that contemporary
scholars turn to use the term ‘governance.’
According to Marinetto (2007: 58) and Rhodes (1997: 15), governance means
self-organized networks. These inter-organizational networks enjoy a certain degree
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of autonomy from the direct intervention of the state. Since the early 1980s, the policy
networks of government have undergone important changes. Networks located around
functional departments grew with the incorporation of new policy actors from the
private and voluntary sectors. This has resulted in a decentered government, where the
central state’s ability to steer and control policy has been weakened due to the growth,
complexity, and independence of inter-organizational networks. New actors and
agencies beyond government, rather than central departments, are integral to the
policy network.
The studies informed by inter-organizational perspectives come to the conclusion
that it is unlikely for policy to be strategically directed by a single agency located in a
neat hierarchical system of authority. The processes involved in making and forming
policy are inevitably the results of interactions among a plurality of separate actors
with separate interests, goals, and strategies. (Scharpf, 1978: 347). This does not
necessarily entail modern political processes are uncoordinated free-for-all.
Interactions tend to stem from the ways units voluntarily coordinate under their
actions. Such coordination occurs without deliberate steering on the part of a central
authority or overarching power (Marinetto, 2007: 56).
In this context, governance refers to self-organization, inter-organizational
networks that are typically interdependent whilst enjoying significant autonomy from
the State (Rhodes, 1997: 15). Rhodes argues networks located around functional
departments grew with the incorporation of new policy actors from the private and
voluntary sector. This has resulted in a decentered government, where the central
state’s ability to steer and control policy has been weakened due to the growth,
complexity and relative independence of inter-organizational networks. One of the
implications of this development is that central government has become increasingly
dependent upon governance to effect policy implementation and service delivery.
Now actors and agencies beyond government, rather than the central government, are
integral to the policy network. This phenomenon has been termed by some scholars as
the ‘hollowing out’ of the state.
Hollowing out refers to the way the state has been eaten away and fragmented.
Smith (1999) studies British polity and points out internal and external factors leading
to hollowing out. Internal forces include market orientation such as privatisation,
contracting out services, the setting-up of quangos and quasi-markets. (Quangos
means quasi-nongovernmental organizations financed by the government to perform
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public functions but acts independent of the government.) External forces include
globalization, such as the international free-flowing of production and finance.
While some scholars describe the state as being hollowing out, others doing
research regarding the operational details of policy networks argue that the central
state has lost the power of direct intervention, but retained the ability to manipulating
the conditions under which policy networks operated (Taylor 1997: 451-2). In other
words, the state continues to exercise influential power by structuring the policy
environment and defining the rules under which actors of the networks interact
(Morgan et.al. 1999).In spite of the importance of networks—or precisely because of
these networks that deal with cross-cutting public issues that cannot be confined to a
specific department, scholars have argued that the state was strengthened, not
weakened. More civil servants or out-sourced project personnel were recruited to
meet the new demands and expectations from various sectors, including civil society.
While governance scholars stress the point of horizontal networks of procedures,
actors of the networks do not receive attention. Foucault raises the concept of
governmentality, which is meant to be the link between politics and the state on the
one hand, and the formation of identity and subjectivity on the other hand.2
Foucault argues that the power apparatus of the state may be all-present but it is
unable to dominate all power relations. The authority of the state is dependent on
existing relations of power, forms of power that do not necessarily originate in the
state.
The presumption that power is a centralized force, used intentionally to oppress
and proscribe is challenged. Power operates in a manner which is not readily
conscious, and it proves highly diffuse and progressively delimits through the very
humane practices, and freely pursued activities, that underpin Western democracies.
Traditionally the state is regarded as a unified and centralized authority, but this kind
of notion has been displaced by a more diffuse, random and unintentional view of
political power.
In poststructural theories, government activity is multifarious and located
throughout the state and society. The concept of governmentality embraces the idea of
2
Foucault did not have a book entirely devoted to the issue of government and politics. He developed
the idea of government rationality, or governmentality, in lectures and interviews. These ideas were
published posthumously. Many scholars follow his ideas and explore them further. See Graham
Burchell et.al. (1991), The Foucault Effect.
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power as a multidimensional entity, infiltrating even the minutiae of everyday life,
which is just as much able to be constructive as to constrain. Governmentality is the
ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the
calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific form of power.
Governmentality also implies the notion of the decentered, fractured, disjointed state.
Foucault once indicated that in political theories we need to ‘cut off the King’s
head’ (1980: 121), and he further suggested that power does not always originate from
the state. The origins, forms, and exercise of power are multifarious and diffused to
both large and small aspects of everyday life. The concept of governmentality serves
as a link to connect government and politics on the one hand, and on the other hand
formation of self, identity, and subjectivity. To govern, it begins with the individual
level of self-governing; pedagogical instruction of children is also an important part of
governing; and finally, the conventional perception of governing as related to the
activities of government is explored by Foucault through detailed analyses of
surveillance of police, medical institutions, and production of knowledge.
In political theories there are many followers who adopt the concept of
Foucauldian governmentality, such as Miller and Rose (1990). In Western countries
the major application of this concept is used to describe how neo-liberal regime
advocates entrepreneurial spirit among citizens, in order to cut-off welfare budget.
Here enterprise culture is a powerful instance of the interface between government
and self-formation.
Both governance and governmentality theories begin with the diminution of the
state power; terms such as ‘hollowing out’ or ‘cutting off the king’s head’ have been
used. However, in detailed research results, we see the increasing influence of the
state as the arena, platform, or interface of various networks of policy advocacy and
resource allocation. While civil society has growing salience in democratic process,
civil society anchors itself in terms of how it can better interact with the state to exert
influence.
In this paper, instead of an analysis of neo-liberalism and enterprise culture, I
will focus on the role of women’s movement and the advocacy of gender
mainstreaming policy in changing the state into ‘ensemble of institutions, analyses,
calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of power.’ Women’s movement on the
one hand contributes to the pace of change regarding the role of the state as networks,
and on the other hand, the increasing scale and complexity of policy networks absorb
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and appropriate forces from women’s movement and civil society, with the result that
gender identity seems to become subsumed under the identity of belonging to a
specific piece of project. Gender itself is fragmented and professionalized according
to specific areas of substantive issues (education, health, welfare) or procedural issues
(being involved in the government restructuring). These details will be presented in
the IV section of this paper, which focuses on gender mainstreaming policy.
Before we start with gender mainstreaming policy developed in recent years, we
need to have an overview of the relationship between the state and society in the case
of women’s organization. The following section will present the different phases of
the state-society relationship.
III. Historical Developments Regarding State-Society Relationship
Below is a table to summarize the state/society relationship across three historical
periods. The first stage is from 1940s to 1970s, this is a period characterized by the
dominance of the KMP party, which adopted state corporatism to incorporate every
walks of life, including women’s organization into party organizations. The
emergence of feminist movement in Taiwan began in the 1970s and came to high tides
in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The second half of 1990s witnessed the partnership
between state and civil society, which was further enhanced after 2000.
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Table 1: State/Society Relationship
KMT party
（1940s-1970s）
Civil society
（1980s-1990s）
partnership
（since 1995-）
State/society
Relationship
Top-down
corporatism
Opposition
Network
Partnership
Actors
Elite women in the
Party mechanism
Elite women in the
Academic and
cultural circles
Gender equality
NGO chief
executives
Objectives
Chinese
nationalism: help
building the nation
to overthrow
communism
Field of actions KMT women’s unit
Political
Attitudes
Openly express
party affiliation
Gender
mainstreaming
Social movement;
Commission on the
street protests; media; Promotion of
the Legislative Yuan
Women’s Rights
Neutral; detached;
critical
Collaborate with state
machinery
This paper examines the post-war development of women’s movement in Taiwan in
terms of the changing relationship between the state and society. There are four stages
in women’s movement. The first (1945-1970) is dominated by the ruling party KMT.
At this time, under authoritarian rule and martial laws, the ruling party and the state
are equivalent, and the party develops extensive networks of women’s organizations
according to occupations and regions. State and society work closely during this
period, with the former as the dominating and directive force. The second stage,
1970-1990, is the period of feminist movement, which self-consciously attempts to
keep autonomy and later develops a critical stance against the government. The third
stage, in the 1990s, is the transitional stage, when the oppositional party DPP won the
municipal election of the Taipei city. Taipei city government establishes women’s
right commission, inviting women’s movement activists to be commissioners. The
fourth stage begins since 2000, when DPP obtains national power and announces the
policy for promoting civil society and the partnership between state and civil society.
To what extent this partnership can be based on equal terms with dialogue and policy
deliberation is still to be observed. Since 1990s’ women’s movement in Taiwan has
gone through transformation from resistant and protesting movement to become part
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of state machinery for policy-making and execution. The theoretical and practical
implication of this transformation will be addressed in this paper.
The 1990s saw the convergence of different social, political, economical forces
which led to a high tide of social movement, in particular women’s movement. These
social, political and economical forces included the liberalization of previously
chartered industries, from banking, insurance, telecommunication, to media industries
such as newspapers, radio, cable TV, satellite TV. Within a few years, there appeared a
great increase in the number of newspapers, magazines, cable TV news programs, TV
talk shows with viewers’ call-in. The changed environment and increased competition
forced the well-established old media organizations to adopt new issues and
perspectives. Gender issues became a hot topic during the 1990s, and the activities of
women’s movement, compared with 1980s and post-2000, received broad coverage.
In terms of political development, the then-oppositional party DPP won several
election campaigns. The most important of all these is the election victory of Mr.
Chen Shui-Bian to be the Mayor of the Taipei City. As oppositional party, DPP had
aligned itself with various kinds of social movements and progressive agenda, such as
labor, environment, social welfare reform. DPP was then supportive of women’s
movement. However, women’s movement in Taiwan tends to remain neutral in party
affiliation. Many members personally support DDP, others in favor of KMT or New
Party—the party that split from KMT in the 1990s and gained passionate support
from urban middle-class who were suspicious of Taiwan nativist movement. In spite
of the fact that many members had their inclination for specific party, within women’s
organizations, gender was regarded as priority. Explicit and open interaction with
specific party in the organizational name was subtly avoided at that time. According
to Fan Yuan, a sociologist investigating social movements in Taiwan, among labor,
environment, and women’s organizations, women’s organizations were least
politicized. Their politics is gender, not party and election campaigns.
Thus we can say women’s movement in the 1990s experienced a “golden
time ”of mobilizing protests against issues such as sexual harassment, rape, family
violence and enjoyed considerable media reports. In the cultural circle, gender issues
are widely debated, and in the academic world, women’s studies and gender studies
also began to gain momentum.
Although members of women’s organizations tended to be reserved for open
endorsement of specific parties and politicians, there were still a small number of
10
them who chose to provide staunch support. During the Taipei City mayor election
campaign of 1994, a few members were in charge of drafting policy proposals
regarding women’s welfare. Among them, Professor Liu Yu Hsiu was the leader. She
advocated the “Scandinavian Model,” meaning the partnership between civil society
and the state. In particular, she advocated the establishment of a commission
composed of both city government officials and representatives from women’s
organizations. After the election, Mr. Chen won and Professor Liu strongly advised
him to initiate the commission as soon as possible. It was established in 1995, with
the name of Commission on the Promotion of Women’s Rights. This is the first time
women’s organizations had the access to the policy planning and implication of the
government—at the level of municipal government. This is indeed a historical
landmark in the development of women’s movement.
So far we have seen the dual directions in the 1990s: protesting against gender
bias on the part both of the general public and government; and since the
establishment of the Commission in 1995, collaboration between the city government
and women’s organizations.
In addition to the commission belonging to the Taipei City Government, the
central government also set up a commission of similar nature, in response to great
pressure from women’s organizations and the general public. In 1997, Commission on
the Promotion of Women’s Rights, under the Executive Yuan and convened by the
prime minister, was formally established. At that time the central government was
KMT administration. For the first few years, this commission remained dormant; in
contrast, commission of the Taipei City government was active.
IV. Gender Mainstreaming and the Growing Complexity of Policy Networks
Gender mainstreaming is the policy approach adopted by UN. In previous
approaches regarding the advancement of women’s status, women are the target group,
and programs for training, education, protection from violence are set up to deal with
women’s issues. In this approach, women become the problems that society and the
state must deal with. In contrast, gender mainstreaming advocates the ideas that in all
processes of policy formation, implementation and assessment, gender perspectives
should be integrated in order to realize in advance whether there exists a gap between
male beneficiaries and female beneficiaries.. Therefore gender mainstreaming does
not target women as specific groups in need of supplementary resources from the
public sector. Instead, in all major policy areas that were once regarded as neutral,
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such as economics and trade, science and technology, agriculture, transportation,
health, education and training, gender analysis exploring the historical and social
conditions that contribute to gender inequality will be conducted in the initial stage of
policy planning.
Gender mainstreaming was first adopted by UN in the Third World Conference
on Women in Nairobi, 1985, and developed into detailed guidelines and Declaration
in The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995. Women’s organizations
in Taiwan attended these conferences in 1985 and 1995, but did not bring what they
had learned into the domestic lobby efforts to pressure the government to adopt
gender mainstreaming. In the 1990s, Taiwanese feminists were preoccupied with
consciousness raising and the reform and amendment of old legislatures. The
Commission on Women’s Rights Promotion, advocated by pro-DPP feminists and
first established at the level of the Taipei city government in 19953, can be said to be
the practice of gender mainstreaming. However, at that time, these feminists used the
terminology of participatory democracy and corporatism of state and society—or, to
use one buzz word popular in the 1990s in Taiwan, “the Scandinavian Model.”
After the DPP won the presidential election in 2000, an increase in the number of
female ministerial-level officials was evident, as ‘one-quarter system’ (women should
occupy at least one-fourth of high level position) had been DPP’s formal party policy
since 1997. Members of women’s movement activists serve in a variety of positions,
including heads of ministerial-level organizations, commissioners of Commission on
Women’s Rights Promotion (CWRP) and other kinds of commissions such as welfare
policy. Some of them began to introduce the concept of gender mainstreaming. It
seemed that gender mainstreaming is similar to CWRP at the city level and central
level. Coordination across different government agencies and partnership between the
public sector and the NGOs sector are emphasized. However, the increase in scale
with regard to gender mainstreaming reinforced and accelerated existing features that
the previous section of this paper points out: governmentality and governance on the
one hand, and on the other hand the segmentation and fragmentation of women’s
interests, or evaporation of women.
1. Gender Mainstreaming
Gender Mainstreaming was first brought out at UN The Third World Conference on
3
Taipei city government took the lead in establishing CWRP; CWRP at the level of the central
government was established in 1997.
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Women, in Nairobi, 1985. In 1995, The Fourth World Conference on Women was
held in Beijing, which results in the Beijing Declaration and Beijing Platform for
Action, BPfA, Gender Mainstreaming was systematically used as the tools and
strategies of policies regarding the enhancement of women’s status.
In July 1997, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)
defined the concept of gender mainstreaming as the following:
"Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for
women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes,
in any area and at all levels. It is a strategy for making the concerns and experiences
of women as well as of men an integral part of the design, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and
societal spheres, so that women and men benefit equally, and inequality is not
perpetuated. The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality."
Responsibility for implementing the mainstreaming strategy is system-wide, and
rests at the highest levels within each nation. There are several basic principles of
mainstreaming which include the following points4:
• Adequate accountability mechanisms for monitoring progress
• The initial identification of issues and problems across all area(s) of activity should
be such that gender differences and disparities can be diagnosed in the initial stage of
policy planning.
• Assumptions that issues or problems are gender neutral should never be made.
• Clear political will and allocation of adequate resources for mainstreaming,
including additional financial and human resources if necessary, are important for
translation of the concept into practice.
• Gender mainstreaming requires that efforts be made to broaden women's equitable
participation at all levels of decision-making.
• Mainstreaming does not replace the need for targeted, women-specific policies and
positive legislation.
The ruling party adopted the terms and concepts of gender mainstreaming in
2004 Presidential campaign and then formally started this in 2005. According to the
UN framework, gender mainstreaming includes 12 critical areas of concern:
z women and poverty
4
Please see the website of UN/CSW: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/index.html, retrieved
February 11, 2008.
13
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
education and training of women
women and health
violence against women
women and armed conflict
women and the economy
women in power and decision-making
institutional mechanism for the advancement of women
human rights of women
women and the media
women and the environment
the girl-child
For the technical part of initiating gender mainstreaming policy, there are three
administrative components: gender analysis; sex-disegregated data; budget-analysis.
We can see the statistic dimension is the prerequisite without which gender
mainstreaming can hardly get moving. In the last decade of the twentieth century,
women’s organizations had devoted endeavors to the substantive areas such as
violence against women, education, etc. without using the buzz word gender
mainstreaming. After the advocacy of women’s organizations and formal adoption by
the central government in recent years, great efforts have been put into the
infrastructure of administrative coordination networks, such as collecting
sex-disegregated data and statistics of budge growth.
These details show us the increasing significance of horizontal, network
development of government and public policies. Substantive issues such as women
and health or violence against women remain important, and programs about them are
implemented with specific reference to gender mainstreaming—I raise this point here
not as a criticism, as recipients and beneficiaries do not have to know the terminology.
What I want to emphasize is the phenomenon that in policy-advocacy area at the
central executive level, when the term and concept of gender mainstreaming is used, it
is largely related to bureaucratic procedures, accountability structure, performance
criteria, assessment tools and formats.
As we will see in the following parts about attending CSW and advocating for a
new governmental agency Gender Equality Council, power does not always originate
from the state. UN and international affairs can become cultural capital to be
valourized by women’s organizations, with the result of women’s organizations taking
the lead while the state becoming follower. However, we should keep in mind that this
14
does not mean women’s organizations have power over the state. I will interpret this
phenomenon as the changing nature of the state from being the central authority to
ensembles of institutions, procedures, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise
of new forms of power which are decentralized, multifarious, fragmented. Although
the state has become more like networks of transaction than a direct authority, the
state remains the major space for such networks to take shape and operate. Its
importance does not decrease; on the contrary, it absorbs various social and cultural
forces and provides them with networks and procedures to reconfigure these forces.
2. CSW and CEDAW
Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is the UN mechanism for policy making
regarding women’s rights in the course of national development. CSW consists of 45
commissioners, with the term of four year appointment. CSW has an annual meeting
in the first two weeks of March. During these two weeks of official conferences,
formal delegations from member countries present country report on status of gender
equality; UN officials and experts present results of regional and country reviews; and
drafts of declarations are discussed during the sessions. All sessions are open to NGO
representatives who have applied in advance for attending. However, these NGOs are
observers only, with no right to speak during the formal session.
In the meantime, there are a great number of parallel events and conferences
organized by International NGOs (INGOs), and this has been a great opportunity for
NGOs from all over the world to come to know each other and start networking for
common concerns.
As Taiwan is not a UN member, women’s organizations in Taiwan were not fully
aware of the importance of UN until recent years. This does not necessarily entail that
in other countries women’s organizations as well as the government recognize the
usefulness of UN processes and resolutions. The last decade of the twentieth century
appeared to have a pivotal role in opening up access for NGO and civil servants who
are not career diplomats. A number of large scale conferences were held in the 1990s,
with participation and collaboration from the global civil society. These conferences
include:
--1992, The Earth Summit in Rio (UNCED: UN Conference on Environment and
Development)
--1993, World Conference on Human Rights, in Vienna, with the result of Vienna
Declaration and Programme of Action
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--1994, International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), in
Cairo
--1995, Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW), in Beijing, with the
result of Beijing Declaration and Beijing Platform for Action.
In the case of attending CSW, there has been a fast increase of number of
participants: from six in 2002, to 29 in 2005, and further to37 in 2006.
Attending the annual meeting of CSW has become a platform of collective
learning in an inter-organizational, inter-sectoral environment. It is not only the
phenomenon that participants physically will enter the headquarters of UN building in
New York and be overwhelmed by the diversity of issues but also the very nature of
the Taiwan delegation that facilitates and speeds up group learning of international
affairs. Starting from the year 2003, civil servants from different ministries of the
central government and from bureaus of local government join the delegation upon
request from Commission on the Promotion of Women’s Rights. Women’s
organizations take the lead in forming the delegation, and various government
agencies follow. This is a rare case in which the government is passive but compliant
in meeting the demands from NGOs. This is due to the convergence of two factors:
first the sharp importance of UN for Taiwan as a symbol for obtaining complete
sovereignty, and secondly the paradox of high degree of politicization regarding UN
on the top level and low degree of politicization among mid-level officials. Such
phenomena testify to the poststructural theory of power and the state as
aforementioned..
3. Commission on Gender Equality
‘Organizational restructuring and down-sizing’ is an important issue that was
vigorously planned soon after DPP took power of the central government.
Restructuring includes, on the one hand, mergers which intend to down-size the
central government and on the other hand, establishment of new organizations to meet
the changing demands of public policies and management. Numerous meetings
convened by the prime minister himself were held; a great number of further meetings
among different ministries and ministerial-level departments regarding details of
merging took place following those convened by the prime minister. News regarding
contents of these meetings were disseminated through media. All this had been a long
process, which, up until now, remains unrealized due to the impediment of the
Legislative Yuan. In spite of lack of actual results, for civil society, the process itself
16
opens up channels of thinking and debating about the role of the central government.
Women’s organizations were not aware of the importance of government
restructuring until they were invited by Ministry of the Interior to attend a meeting
regarding the possibility of setting up a ‘bureau of children and women’s welfare.’
They were infuriated with the familiar phenomenon that women and children had
been put together as one and the same thing by public policy and by the general public.
After a short period of expressing dissatisfaction, members of women’s organizations
soon realized instead of criticizing the current draft, it was better to adopt a pro-active
approach by advocating an independent organization in charge of enhancing women’s
status. ‘Ministry of Women’s Right’ came out as the initial idea, and shortly afterward
many pointed out ‘gender equality’ is more appropriate than ‘women’s rights’ and this
reached consensus in a relatively easy way.
Diversity of opinions began to emerge regarding the position of the organization:
is this a ministry—an organization which has full-fledged stipulated authority of
policy making and implementation, or a commission—an organization at the
ministerial level but only in charge of policy planning and inter-ministerial
coordination? Within women’s organizations this had been hotly debated. As the
number of ministries is strictly limited in the government restructuring plan, members
of women’s organizations were practical enough to know it is impossible to push for a
ministry of gender equality. Women’s organizations finally decided to settle for the
Commission on Gender Equality. As restructuring involves all existing organizations
and new ones to be set up, any members of Legislative Yuan not satisfied with
particular details can reject to vote for the bill, the bill sent by the Executive Yuan
regarding government restructuring has been dormant for years.
In terms of the case of government restructuring, what are the implications for
the development of civil society in Taiwan?To begin with, this is the first time
women’s organizations have the formal and open opportunity to actually get
themselves involved in planning the administrative machinery of the central executive
government. In the past they were mainly engaged in advocating for specific pieces of
legislature. Their interactions with the executive branches are mainly about tendering
bids to deliver service. Therefore getting involved in the government restructuring is a
fresh learning experience. Second, there is no coalition of various sectors of civil
society. Women’s organizations were fully occupied with gender quality as a single
issue. Third, civil society has not developed a solid discourse regarding the rationale
of government restructuring. The government emphasizes ‘down-sizing,’ indicating
17
that diminution of government size and number of civil servants will increase the
efficiency of government. No one questions the dilemma of decreasing size and
increasing demands for public service. In the final draft bill of restructuring, the
central executive overall increases in size, budget, and personnel. In the meantime
benefit packages for civil servants were cut down and non-tenured, contracted
workers were recruited. Whether from the side of the central government or from the
side of civil society, there has been in lacking concerns with the political philosophy
of the state. Fourth, the existing Commission on Promotion of Women’s Rights have
played an important role of providing interface between women’s organizations and
bureaucrats to discuss details of establishing the new organization. This is a positive
case where we see the partnership taking substantive shape by on-going and regular
discussions.
V. Conclusion: Rethinking the State and Civil Society
From the previous discussion of gender mainstreaming policy, we can see the
increasing salience of policy networks that have multiple actors outside the state.
There is indeed the decrease of the direct power of the state. However, the state is not
weakened or hollowed out. On the contrary, women’s movement activists rely heavily
on the policy networks activated by the state.
The nature of the state has gone through three phases of change: first as the
center of power and authority, second as the decentered networks and ensembles of
institutions which seem to hollow out, and finally in this paper, as the nodal point of
networks that reasserts its strategic importance by setting up the conditions of
operations, absorbing power that does not originate from the state to feedback into
mechanism of legitimacy.
In this process of proliferation of policy networks, civil society has segmented
into professional social service organizations or advocacy organizations. While the
conventional notion of the state as a unified entity has to be modified, the notion of
civil society as a whole is also under revision. Both fragmented into pieces and then
re-sutured into networks of task-forces.
Governance, defined as the process of forming networks and leadership, is not
only relevant to the government but also applicable to business, to NGOs, and to a
specific project. As more and more organizational actors across various sectors can
claim to make use of governance, their self-perception and identity become
18
increasingly instantiated by the nature they interact with the state. In the case of
women’s movement in Taiwan, while the criticism of patriarchy dominated the
feminist discourses in 1980s and 1990s, in recent years the term ‘patriarchy’ appeared
less often. Instead, activists often talk about what the government should do to secure
gender equality, or how they themselves have interacted with the government to do
what is expected. The state is a gendered state, while identity of feminists at the same
time inserts itself into the state as parts of policy networks. In this sense, we can say
gender mainstreaming has forged a new governmentality that serves as the link
between the practical techniques of state operation and feminist identity.
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